The joy of first love that comes in early youth--and always it does come
then, though it is not always confessed--is a gawky and somewhat guilty
joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of
self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura's autograph album after all his
versifying on the kitchen table could only write "Truly Yours" and leave
her to define the deep significance of the phrase so obviously inverted.
And she in his autograph album could only trust herself--though
naturally being female she was bolder--to the placid depths of "As ever
your friend." Though in lean, hungry-eyed Nathan Perry's book she burst
into glowing words of deathless remembrance and Grant wrote in Emma
Morton's album fervid stanzas wherein "you" rimed with "the wandering
Jew" and "me" with "eternity." At school where the subtle wisdom of
childhood reads many things not writ in books, the names of Grant and
Laura were linked together, in the innocent gossip of that world.
They say that modern thought deems these youthful experiences dangerous
and superfluous; and so probably they will end, and the joy of this
earliest mating season will be bottled up and stored for a later
maturity. God is wise and good. Doubtless some new and better thing will
take the place of this first moving of the waters of life in the heart;
but for us of the older generation that is beginning to fade, we are
glad that untaught and innocent, our lips tasted from that spring when
in the heart was no knowledge of the poison that might come with the
draft.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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